Sign up for our mailing list

News

With his new album Songs of Resistance 1942 - 2018, New York City’s Marc Ribot—one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed guitar players—set out to assemble a set of songs that spoke to the current political moment with appropriate ambition, passion, and fury.

The eleven songs on the record are drawn from the World War II anti-Fascist Italian partisans, the U.S. civil rights movement and Mexican protest ballads as well as original compositions, and feature a wide range of guest vocalists including Tom Waits, Steve Earle, Meshell Ndegeocello, Justin Vivian Bond, Fay Victor, Sam Amidon, and Ohene Cornelius.

The album’s newest track “Bella Ciao” features vocals from Tom Waits – the first song Waits has contributed vocals to in two years. Documentary filmmaker Jem Cohen created a provocative video for the song including footage of the Trump inaugural and various marches and rallies; listen to the song and watch the video HERE.

“Mussolini’s voodoo economics led Italy into a generation of poverty and a senseless war with hundreds of thousands of Italian casualties—including over 30 thousand Partisans,” Ribot explains of the songs origins. “This song tells the story of one of them. At a tender moment when he or she is saying goodbye to her lover (Bella Ciao=goodbye, beautiful) and trying to imagine what it means to fight for freedom. I played Tom a bunch of the tunes and he immediately bonded with that one. “Of course, he brings a certain gravitas to everything he does—my Italian friends say he sounds exactly like an old ‘partigiano’ (resistance fighter)!”

Over a forty-year career, Ribot has released twenty-five albums under his own name and been a beacon of New York’s downtown/experimental music scene, leading a series of bands including Los Cubanos Postizos and Ceramic Dog. Since his work with Tom Waits on 1985’s Rain Dogs album, though, he is best known to the world as a sideman, playing on countless albums by the likes of Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp, Norah Jones, the Black Keys, and Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’ Grammy-winning collaboration Raising Sand.

Ribot will celebrate the release of ‘Songs of Resistance’ with a special album release show at NYC’s Le Poisson Rouge on October 8 with special guests also featured on the record, including Justin Vivian Bond, Ohene Cornelius, Domenica Fossati and Fay Victor. The grassroots organizations Rise & Resist and NY Renews will also be present at the show with more information on their causes. Tickets are available HERE.

Portions of the album’s proceeds will be donated to The Indivisible Project, an organization that helps individuals resist the Trump agenda via grassroots movements in their local communities. More info on The Indivisible Project can be found at https://www.indivisible.org/.